I disagree with this article for the most part, it doesn’t make sense to say that just because some group projects are not optimal implies all project based learning is bad. I think doing projects individually is hugely important both from learning theory and also learning software design. In college we had group projects and individual projects going on simultaneously, one of which was building google maps for a US state given only some location data. This project simultaneously taught me about various data structures and algos (Kd-tree, graph search, autocorrect) and we later extended it to use networking in a client server architecture. I think it’s invaluable to have students do many parts of a project individually and then come together to build larger projects and this addresses the concerns of the author.
I think this comment touches on the idea that, given a few hundred students enrolled in a course, there will be some subsets of students who get more out of one type of teaching/learning methodology vs some others.
Therefore, at random places at random times there will be courses that emphasise some methodology/ies where a majority of the students do well, or not, given some kind of bell curve distribution of student-methodology success.
The outcome of which is that, occasionally, someone can write a convincing argument for or against some particular methodology.
Teaching and learning, at scale, is difficult; outcomes are ill defined and hard to measure; correlation, causation, competing priorities and influences.
